South African government, friends and family rally round to support 'golden girl' and condemn IAAF

When asked by a reporter while walking into the medal ceremony how she was feeling following the announcement that she is undergoing a gender verification test, Semenya smiled and said, "Good, man".

Dressed in a yellow and green track suit, Semenya waved to the crowd as she mounted the podium to receive her gold medal. She then stood with her hands behind her back and mouthed the words to the South African national anthem.

Back home, an official statement from the ANC described the 18-year-old as the nation's "golden girl" and a role model for other young athletes. "We condemn the motives of those who have made it their business to question her gender due to her physique and running style," said the ANC statement. "Such comments can only serve to portray women as being weak.

"Caster is not the only woman athlete with a masculine build and the International Association of Athletics Federation (IAAF) should know better."

Semenya's spectacular pace, strong muscular build, husky voice and some facial hair has ignited a passionate and angry debate in South Africa, with some black callers to radio stations denouncing Australians as racists because its media was the first to reveal that the IAAF had begun investigations into Semenya's gender.

Semenya, in interviews with local radio stations, said she was unfazed by the furore. "I am exhilarated and on top of the world," she said yesterday before going on a training run in Berlin where she won her gold medal on Wednesday evening. She said her critics could "go to Hell," and went on: "It's good for me to have won the world championship. My opponents were expecting me to get only to the semi-final."

The runner's 80-year-old grandmother, who lives in the rural village of Ga-Masehlong near the Limpopo River more than 200 miles north of Johannesburg, joined in the debate. "It doesn't bother me that much, because I know she's a woman. I raised her myself," said Maphuthi Sekgala.

Despite reports from Berlin that Semenya had been shielded by officials from global speculation about her gender, Mrs Sekgala said this was not true. "Caster phoned me after the (800 metres] heats and told me that they think she's a man," said Sekgala. "What can I do when they call Caster a man, when she's really not a man? It is God who made her look that way."

Deborah Morolong, Semenya's best friend from high school, said: "I think they are saying she's a man out of jealousy. It really hurts me when they say that about her."

Morolong added: "But she never had a boyfriend. She doesn't like boys." And grandmother Sekgala said her granddaughter had always been teased about her boyish looks and about being the only girl in the village soccer team.

But Semenya's former school headmaster said he thought for years that the student was a boy. "She was always rough and played with the boys," Eric Modiba, head of the Nthema Secondary School, told the Beeld newspaper. "She liked soccer and she wore pants to school. She never wore a dress. It was only in Grade 11 that I realised she's a girl."

Semenya is a first-year sports science student at Pretoria University. One of her track coaches at the university, Mr Hennie Kriel, said there had been constant speculation about the running star's gender. But since he knew her well he said he found the allegations "strange" before adding: "It could just be athletes trying to unsettle her."

South Africa's Football Players Union (SAFPU) was one of scores of organisations adding its voice to an uproar likely to continue for many days. Expressing disappointment with the IAAF's decision to subject Semenya to complex gender tests, the professional soccer players' organisation said: "It shows that these imperialist countries can't afford to accept the talent that South Africa as a continent has.

"The athletics federation must not allow itself to be used by countries like Australia to push their racist agenda against South Africa."

SAFPU has singled out Australia for criticism because it claims the country has been in the forefront of "anti-South Africa" comments following the award of next year's Fifa World Cup to South Africa.

In Ga-Masehlong, the world champion's father, Jacob Semenya, said: "She is my little girl. I raised her and I have never doubted she is a woman, and I can repeat that a million times."

Semenya's mother, Dorcas, who bears a marked physical resemblance to her daughter, was surrounded by her five other children when she said: "She (Caster] was a disciplined, kind, hard-working and patient child whose ambition was to play for the women's national (soccer] team."

Laboratory and genetic testing was introduced at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics.

Women typically have two X chromosomes and men have an X and a Y chromosome in each cell. The presence of two X chromosomes is taken as confirmation of the athlete's female gender. Test results for about one in 500-600 athletes are abnormal.

The International Association of Athletics Federations abandoned gender verification tests in the 1990s, concluding they were not needed because of urine testing to exclude doping. Voiding is observed by an official to verify that a sample from a given athlete has come from his or her urethra.

The International Olympic Committee suspended tests before the 2000 Sydney Games. The Olympic Council of Asia still conducts tests.

A verification test requires a physical medical evaluation, and includes reports from a gynaecologist, endocrinologist, psychologist, and an internal medicine specialist.

Eight athletes failed gender verification tests at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics but were all cleared by subsequent physical examinations.

Gender question goes back to Berlin in 1936

NEW women's world 800metres champion Caster Semenya is just the latest sports person to have her gender thrown into question. Particularly in athletics, where individual strength can count for more than in team sports demanding skill, examples have cropped up occasionally in which people competing as women have turned out to be men, or somewhere between the two sexes.

One of the most famous cases involved the very Olympic Stadium in Berlin where the current world championships are being held. Competing in the high jump at the 1936 Olympic Games, three years after Adolf Hitler came to power, a German known as Dora Ratjen came fourth.

Although some other competitors had their suspicions, nothing was done at the time. Two years later, however, while travelling home after setting a world record for the high jump at the European Championships in Vienna, Ratjen was reported by two women.

Having noticed a person wearing a skirt but sporting a five o'clock shadow, they concluded that "Dora" was a man. An examination by a doctor proved they were right, Ratjen's real name was revealed as Hermann, and he never competed in an athletics event again.

In 1957, Ratjen claimed he had been coerced by the Nazis into competing as a woman as part of their strategy to win as many events as possible at the '36 Games. "For three years I lived the life of a girl," he said. "It was most dull."

Another similar case at the Nazi Olympics involved Stella Walsh, the Polish sprinter who was defending her 100m title. She came second to the American Helen Stephens, who had to undergo a genital inspection after being accused of being a man. Stephens passed, and Walsh went on to compete for some time. It was only after she was shot dead in 1980 when a bystander to an armed robbery that Walsh was found to possess male genitalia.

A less well documented case involved a Czechoslovakian called Zdenka Koubkowa, who in 1934 set the world record for the 800m in London. Again, nothing happened at the time, but it was later quietly announced that

Koubkowa was, or had become, a man. In 1964 a North Korean called Sin Kim Dan hit the headlines with world records at both 400 and 800m. Her celebrity eventually brought her to the attention of a South Korean man, who recognised "her" as the son he had lost in the war.

Ewa Klobukovsa, the winner of relay gold at the Tokyo Olympics in 1964, became the first Olympian to fail a gender test three years later and was banned from competing. By that time, the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) had introduced tests for all female competitors, with interesting results.

The tests first became mandatory at the European championships in Budapest in 1966. Virtually all the entrants undertook the tests and went on to compete, but there were several noticeable absences.

Russian sisters Tamara and Irina Press, for example, stayed at home to look after their mother, who was reported to be sick. Known to their rivals as the Press Brothers, they had four world records between them.

Two other Russian athletes, Tatiana Schelkanova and Maria Itkina, were said to have been ruled out of competing by injuries. The nature of the injuries was never specified, and they too came under suspicion. So did Iolanda Balas of Romania, who turned up in the Hungarian capital, but only to spectate, having also picked up an injury which some regarded as dubious.

Coming far closer to the present day, in 2006 the Asian Games 800m champion, Santhi Soundarajan of India, was stripped of her gold medal. She too failed a gender test.

Gender testing for female athletes was dropped before the Sydney Olympics of 2000, but other sports have become involved in it and supplied recent examples. In golf, transsexual Mianne Bagger was allowed to compete on the women's tour after it was agreed she had become a woman. And earlier this year German tennis player Sarah Gronert, 22, was certified as female and allowed to continue competing: she was born with male and female genitalia, but had surgery to remove the male parts at the age of 19.

Bagger and Gronert, like Semenya, were not accused of cheating, and that is why all three differ from cases such as Walsh and Ratjen. The IAAF, although heavily criticised for announcing the investigation of Semenya four hours before her final, have gone out of their way to insist they accept she is competing in good faith.

After Semenya won her race, she did not attend the medal winners' press conference, but was replaced by IAAF general secretary Pierre Weiss. He said the tests had been ordered because of "ambiguity, not because we believe she is cheating".

There certainly is ambiguity – not necessarily about Semenya, but about what will happen if she is found to be "too male" by one or more of the scientific experts who have been tasked with testing her.

With no specific rules in place about when a female competitor has an unfair advantage because of naturally occurring levels of male hormones, the world governing body may have to choose between making an example of the South African teenager and accepting she is simply fortunate to have advantages over more slightly built competitors.